Fuego: unleashing collective Queer Chicanx/Latinx rebellion, counterpublics and imagination

Abstract

This essay is a reflection and assessment of the ConFem and faculty collective’s queer Chicanx/Latinx intergenerational solidarity activism. In conversation with abolition feminisms, transformative justice practices, and queer performance studies, we illustrate the shifts the collective effected toward queerer Chicanx/Latinx feminist futurities. Our collective solidarity praxis was an intervention that actively undermined the anti-solidarity machinations of the state’s social hierarchical ordering at the site of the university. This essay addresses the collective’s strategic move to shift away from supplicating or engaging with the state for appeasement or resolution of violence, and instead to turn to harnessing the power of queer Chicanx/Latinx visionary artists to unleash queer feminist Chicanx/Latinx counterpublics and imagination.

Keywords:

• Chicana feminism
• Latinx feminisms
• feminist solidarity
• queer performance
• Chicanx performance
• abolition feminisms
• transformative justice

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 In Keywords For Latina/o Studies, scholar Shelia Marie Contreras notes that the Chicano identity was used by activists of Mexican descent during the late sixties and early seventies “to signify self-determination, working-class origins, and a critique of social power” (32). Chicano Studies as a field of study emerged out of that social movement and struggle. There are different ways the terms Chicana/o/x have been used. When using “Chicano,” the masculine “o” is emphasized to represent the heteropatriarchal structure within Chicano Studies as an academic field. “Chicana,” gendered in the feminine in Spanish, is used to signify identify woman-identified activists, as well as to speak of Chicana feminist organizers who have a long genealogy of doing foundational work to disrupt patriarchy in the Chicano movement by adding a gendered critique. More recently, queer and trans activists and scholars introduced “Chicanx” to disrupt the gender binaries in the Spanish language and to intentionally signal and support a gender expansive consciousness and queer/trans identities.

2 For example, Chicana leadership was suppressed and excluded at the same time Chicanas were burdened with the heavy lifting of the labor that maintained the department and student organization. For details regarding the history and analysis of the conditions and context of violence faced, please see: Ana Clarissa Rojas Durazo, “Decolonizing Chicano Studies in the Shadows of the University’s ‘Heteropatriarchal’ Order,” in The Imperial University: Academic Repression and Scholarly Dissent (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 187–214.

3 Conciencia Femenil, or ConFem, is an intergenerational Chicana/x feminist collective founded at CSU Long Beach in 2009. ConFem was inspired, in part, by the legacy of the early Chicana feminist collective Las Hijas de Cuauhtemoc, who disrupted the patriarchy of the Chicano movement of the late 60s and early 70s with their organizing, publications, and consciousness-raising groups.

4 Zepeda’s autoethnographic narratives included here signal the use of such narratives of testimonio in Chicana intellectual traditions and methodologies.

5 One of the comments referenced an imagined Aztec Law that detailed the way to kill gay and lesbian community members.

6 We intentionally used the “@” instead of “o” in Chicano Studies to disrupt the heteropatriarchal structures in the discipline and to expand it to make it more inclusive to women, trans, and gender expansive folks. In a sense, the “@” encompasses both the “a” and the “o” as it sets forth another script altogether through which to understand Chicanidad. See Sandra Soto’s Reading Chican@ Like a Queer, University of Texas Press, 2010.

7 Title IX of the U.S. Education Amendments of 1972 is a policy that sets forth the imagined parameters by which sex discrimination in educational settings can be encountered or legally asserted.

Additional information

Funding

The author(s) reported there is no funding associated with the work featured in this article.

Notes on contributors

Ana Clarissa Rojas Durazo

A. C. Rojas Durazo Guided by the generations that follow hers, Ana Clarissa Rojas Durazo practices transformative mama pedagogies by day while decolonizing chicanx studies by trade. At UC Davis, Clarissa is a scholar artivist affiliated with Gender Studies and Cultural Studies. Clarissa is an internationally published poet who believes the creative spirit ends violence. Clarissa co-founded INCITE! and coedited Color of Violence: the INCITE Anthology and Community Accountability: Emerging Movements to Transform Violence. Her writing appears most recently in Abolition Feminisms: Organizing, Survival, and Transformative Practice and in Politico and Truthout. Clarissa is currently working on a poetry collection entitled In Caracol Time. Clarissa is guided by the sonoran desertlands along the u.s. mexico border that raised and cultivated her as well as her maternal ancestors.

Nadia Zepeda

N. Zepeda Nadia Zepeda is an interdisciplinary scholar activist from Santa Ana, CA. She’s an Assistant Professor in the Department of Chicana/o Studies at California State University, Fullerton. Nadia received her BA in Chicano/Latino Studies & Spanish from California State University, Long Beach where she co-founded the Chicana feminist collective Conciencia Femenil (ConFem). She received her PhD in Chicana/o & Central American Studies from University of California, Los Angeles. Through collaborative and community-based research, she traces the genealogy of healing justice in Chicana/x feminist organizing. Her teaching, research, and commitment to healing justice exemplify her investments in visions of transformative justice in the university and beyond.